Gimp Gap or Pencil for animations?

[arcull]

Hi everyone, I plan to try to do some simple cartoon animations and wonder which tool should I use. I prefer free tools and as I googled a bit I found Gimp has an extension named GAP, besides I found Pencil also as recomended tool for making animations. I'm quite familiar with Gimp, but still a begginer in animations, so what tool would you suggest I should try? What are your experiences? Thanks for suggestions.

[SmithWillSuffice]

For 2D there is KToon, or the tools you yourself suggested, Gimp must be pretty favourable I'd think.

For 3D probably Blender, once you get over the steep learning curve.

For making live notes (like Khan Academy videos) I'm not sure what would be recommended, maybe a desktop recorder in combo with a tablet drawing app? This is a further question I want to pose to this thread.

From my experience, the main thing is a good (high positional capture fidelity) pen+tablet. I haven't the ash to trial too many, I just know the cheaper Genius Tablets can be hard to configure correctly under GNU+Linux, best to pay the top dollars for a Pen+Tablet set that is known to work perfectly with GNU+Linux.

[strafe_sawdoffe]

From my own experience: Pencil looks great on paper (forgive the pun) but it is incredibly limited in terms of features, and about half of the features that do exist are broken in some critical way.

I've done animating in GIMP w/o the plugin, and used a video editor (kdenlive) to arrange the images together, add sounds, etc. I don't know how much the GAP plugin will simplify things, but even without it, I've found GIMP to be a pleasure to use.

Ex: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuCyo0KIgqQ

The frames were done entirely in Gimp and edited together with kdelive.

Hope this helps.

[kellemes]

Pencil last updated in 2008.. looks dead to me.

Synfig Studio (http://www.synfig.org/cms/)?

[prokoudine]

Pencil last updated in 2008.. looks dead to me.

Not really true.

The upstream project is slow. There is an active fork:

https://github.com/morevnaproject/pencil